I'm looking for a good PRG which could hopefully allow me to control a starfield.I've seen a few on various demos which allow me to control certain parameters like speed & direction etc, but haven't found one suitable for this purpose yet. Sometimes I see great starfields but they are displayed too briefly to use.

I'm wanting to screen capture the starfield to later add a sprite I made in 'pixel-edit', so I'll be animating this sprite in final cut as I"m familiar with the software.

Ideally I'd create my own starfield. It's the longest way around it but I figured I'd learn to write in STOS basic as I'd also like to make some scrollers for my visuals (through steem for now), but I've been finding a few issues getting started (mainly trying to enter language disk 1 to learn throught the manual's guide), so I'm coming back to my original purpose to find an easier way whilst I take more time to understand A drives in steem & STOS. I've searched a lot for good starfield PRGs, or games which display them well enough to record as I'm spending too much time fault finding in order to load up code of a starfield setup in STOS which I'd like to further edit.

Any recommendations for a cool starfield, or a starfield editor as such would be great if anything springs to mind.Cheers Atari heads!

There are some nice starfields in demos by The Lost Boys.The maths isn't too difficult and can easily be implemented in STOS.

I seem to remember a great rotating starfield in the Atari STe Mental Hangover demo by The Pixel Twins.Instead of single pixels, you could plot a bob instead. Check this out at 4m21s:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_ZurYvf_yY

There was a STOS extension purely for generating starfields. I think it was included on a ST Format coverdisk.

Its results were actually quite impressive, and it allowed horizontal and vertical multi-level parallax starfields (as well as in between angles I think). From what I recall, it was only a couple of lines to set up the starfield, just passing a few parameters including the number of stars to display.

Hey thanks for that Total Eclipse, I'll have a dig through the ST format discs & look out for it.

& yes, the demo construction kit would be amazing LynXX. I think a while back you'd recommended this & I tried it, but rediscovered that for some reason I'm unable to get the program started. I think its due to perhaps a slight lack of knowledge on my part in the way steem works. I'll really need to come back to that one & figure out why I can't start it up.

I also had a problem learning Stos game creator as I got so far through the manual's guide, I couldn't get any further when it asked for language disk 1, I think maybe theres some fundamental things about steem I'm missing as I'm pretty new to using it with apps. I'd burn it to floppy & use my ST but, it's missing a few keys! Buying x2 fresh STs from a friend soon anyway

but yes, Demo Construction Kit seems like a great way to get my visuals together.

As a back up plan to keep the whole idea moving, not sure if anyones interested but here's some awesome demos & games I found great starfields in:

Eventually it's gonna look very edgy. I was fascinated by 'revenge of the mutant camels' as a kid, which inspires me to make sprites in a similar warped kinda psychedelic way. Should be really good, it's gonna be to a remix of 'operation Thunderbolt', going into another remix of 'cosmic pirates'.

It runs quite well and 2 examples are included:(1) A horizontal starfield and (2) a "3d" zoomer starfield that changes its origin depending on the joystick position.This is fun to use and good enough for prototypes.There is no control over the initial positions or speed of individual stars in the array though.

mlynn1974 wrote:There are some nice starfields in demos by The Lost Boys.The maths isn't too difficult and can easily be implemented in STOS.

Any links to good, readable source code for a 3D starfield (in basic or ASM)?

This was always one of those effects where I'm sure I must be missing what the trick is, because the way I'd logically do it would be too slow for a demo screen... unless projections are all precalculated?

I had a look through the ST format disks & tried 37a out of a few, now I've just given 37b a go, got it!

I was starting to learn STOS the other week & was doing alright, but couldn't complete the user guide after I was asked for the language disk, so theres a lot I'm missing yet, I'm learning on steem too as my atari is missing a few keys & its easier to get started with the moment. So just struggling to run it on stos due a lack of understanding on my part, might need to get the manual out again & give it another go before I can try this.

There might be a lot more I need to understand, but I've got as far as running STOS STARS extension installer V1.0 by Lee Upcraft, but I don't know what to do to get it started. I pressed 1 to install STOS interpreter extension which seemed ok, but when I chose 2 to install the compiler it displayed 'there is no compiler folder on this disk'. I'm just confused as a newbee to stos regards how it works in general.

I think I need to complete the STOS 2.6 guide before I can continue, unless theres something obvious I'm misunderstanding. If I type list it brings up the code for it so I know its loaded ok, I think I'm running the installer & not the program. Might need to get back to this once I've learnt more about Stos I think. Cheers though, a brilliant reference to come back to soon!

I've written an example 2d (horizontal) and 3d starfield in STOS.It requires Misty and Missing Link for dot, wipe and hardkey commands.There is a faster version with a 1 plane clear screen and 1 plane dot routine written in ASM. Please see the attachments.

This isn't optimized for speed but might be useful for educational purposes.It's really cool that Steem can emulate a printer to allow us to print to a file. You can simply dump the STOS listing using LLIST.

Ahhhh, thanks! You know, that's how I'd have done it - surely demos must precalc the 3D projections?

I don't think it's necessary to precalc the 3D projections. On the Amiga Paul from DigiTech helped me write a 3D starfield in ASM using integer maths, divs and muls and I got 500 stars at 50Hz. I used the blitter to clear the bitplane though.

On the ST a fast dot routine is possible with the Y-table scanline offset table and power table:plotpoints dc.w 32768,16384,8192,4096,2048,1024,512,256,128,64,32,16,8,4,2,1

In The Misty Demos A Globe Called Alice was entirely precalculated and took up about 105kB.I have the point data for the globe somewhere, but not the equations...

LynXX wrote:I fired up DCK on Hatari, what a blast from the past!! Last time I used this was probably 25 years ago on a real ST

Hey cheers, & massive extra thanks for annotating it in English! I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to run it in steem. I burnt DCK to floppy & run it on my Atari. I know I was missing something simple in getting it started - I was running in low res, set to high res & I'm laughing now. Will have a good play around with it later this eve, at the mo I'm trying to get Maxymiser to burn to floppy, makedisk doesn't seem to work with PRGs but, I'm sure theres a thread on here explaining it.Looking forward to getting some stars moving about!

Oh yeah, it doesn't run on low res. The weird thing is that with EmuTOS it just returns to the desktop without any error, whereas with a real TOS it does display a message about the resolution (in French, though!)

LynXX wrote:Oh yeah, it doesn't run on low res. The weird thing is that with EmuTOS it just returns to the desktop without any error, whereas with a real TOS it does display a message about the resolution (in French, though!)

Haha, yeah I got part of that message & wondered what I was doing wrong, thought I'd test it on the ST just to be sure I had my settings right in Steem. Good that I now have it to play with on the ST as a result though! Just hope my floppy disks are as good as they once we're